ManageEngine, the real-time IT management company, debuted ServiceDesk Plus 8.1, its ITIL-ready help desk software that features an all-new CMDB, as well as integrated asset management capabilities.
The company is demonstrating the solution as a "Gold Sponsor" at HDI 2012 on April 24-27, 2012 in Orlando, Florida, as well as at the Service Desk & IT Support Show on April 24-25, 2012 in London.
Many IT organizations are managing business-critical systems and services with network monitoring tools, help desk software and other solutions that provide notifications about problems and outages after they've already occurred and are impacting the business. A CMDB helps IT prevent problems before they happen by identifying and managing the relationships and dependencies of all technology assets - hardware, software, services and non-traditional devices - because today, any technology component may become business critical at any time.
For IT shops charged with delivering high quality business services to their users, the top three benefits of CMDB technology are:
Reduce Downtime
The smartest way to ensure systems and services are available 24/7 is to create a comprehensive, direct visualization map that defines and displays the inter-relationship of each configuration item (CI) on the network. CMDB provides a complete representation of the network, including all IT assets and their inter-relationships, so that IT can understand the potential impact of planned and unexpected events to the environment. That clear and immediate insight drives faster assessment and resolution of IT issues.
Improve End-User Experience
With the lightening-fast pace of business and e-commerce today, ensuring that end-users are never without the systems and applications they rely on is mission critical. Having a CMDB implemented helps IT departments resolve problems up to five times faster - or even avoid them altogether - by having greater visibility of all key IT assets. The result? Employees and end-users are never interrupted from a day's work.
Prevent Costly Incidents
Imagine the chaos for an IT department when a finance application goes down without a clear understanding of the relationship between each asset. It could mean hours of unnecessary backtracking and problem-solving for an already busy IT staff. A CMDB reveals the ramifications of such events before planned maintenance tasks are performed or disasters happen. Using a CMDB, IT can upgrade software, take hardware offline, and much more, with the least possible disruption to business users and services.
"Deploying a CMDB is probably one of the most effective ways IT can proactively manage and optimize their business-critical systems and services," said Uma Shankar, product manager at ManageEngine. "Still, a lot of companies are reluctant to adopt CMDB technology because it has a reputation as being complex and difficult to use. But it doesn't have to be, as we've shown with the ServiceDesk Plus CMDB. So now, we're really challenging people to take a fresh look at CMDB and what it can do for them."
ServiceDesk Plus (8.1) will be available by the end of April.
Click here for a free trial demo edition
VIDEO: What's New in ServiceDesk Plus 8.1
ManageEngine Adds Configuration Management to ServiceDesk Plus
The Latest
Like most digital transformation shifts, organizations often prioritize productivity and leave security and observability to keep pace. This usually translates to both the mass implementation of new technology and fragmented monitoring and observability (M&O) tooling. In the era of AI and varied cloud architecture, a disparate observability function can be dangerous. IT teams will lack a complete picture of their IT environment, making it harder to diagnose issues while slowing down mean time to resolve (MTTR). In fact, according to recent data from the SolarWinds State of Monitoring & Observability Report, 77% of IT personnel said the lack of visibility across their on-prem and cloud architecture was an issue ...
In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 23, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses the NetOps labor shortage ...
Technology management is evolving, and in turn, so is the scope of FinOps. The FinOps Foundation recently updated their mission statement from "advancing the people who manage the value of cloud" to "advancing the people who manage the value of technology." This seemingly small change solidifies a larger evolution: FinOps practitioners have organically expanded to be focused on more than just cloud cost optimization. Today, FinOps teams are largely — and quickly — expanding their job descriptions, evolving into a critical function for managing the full value of technology ...
Enterprises are under pressure to scale AI quickly. Yet despite considerable investment, adoption continues to stall. One of the most overlooked reasons is vendor sprawl ... In reality, no organization deliberately sets out to create sprawling vendor ecosystems. More often, complexity accumulates over time through well-intentioned initiatives, such as enterprise-wide digital transformation efforts, point solutions, or decentralized sourcing strategies ...
Nearly every conversation about AI eventually circles back to compute. GPUs dominate the headlines while cloud platforms compete for workloads and model benchmarks drive investment decisions. But underneath that noise, a quieter infrastructure challenge is taking shape. The real bottleneck in enterprise AI is not processing power, it is the ability to store, manage and retrieve the relentless volumes of data that AI systems generate, consume and multiply ...
The 2026 Observability Survey from Grafana Labs paints a vivid picture of an industry maturing fast, where AI is welcomed with careful conditions, SaaS economics are reshaping spending decisions, complexity remains a defining challenge, and open standards continue to underpin it all ...
The observability industry has an evolving relationship with AI. We're not skeptics, but it's clear that trust in AI must be earned ... In Grafana Labs' annual Observability Survey, 92% said they see real value in AI surfacing anomalies before they cause downtime. Another 91% endorsed AI for forecasting and root cause analysis. So while the demand is there, customers need it to be trustworthy, as the survey also found that the practitioners most enthusiastic about AI are also the most insistent on explainability ...
In the modern enterprise, the conversation around AI has moved past skepticism toward a stage of active adoption. According to our 2026 State of IT Trends Report: The Human Side of Autonomous AI, nearly 90% of IT professionals view AI as a net positive, and this optimism is well-founded. We are seeing agentic AI move beyond simple automation to actively streamlining complex data insights and eliminating the manual toil that has long hindered innovation. However, as we integrate these autonomous agents into our ecosystems, the fundamental DNA of the IT role is evolving ...
AI workloads require an enormous amount of computing power ... What's also becoming abundantly clear is just how quickly AI's computing needs are leading to enterprise systems failure. According to Cockroach Labs' State of AI Infrastructure 2026 report, enterprise systems are much closer to failure than their organizations realize. The report ... suggests AI scale could cause widespread failures in as little as one year — making it a clear risk for business performance and reliability.
The quietest week your engineering team has ever had might also be its best. No alarms going off. No escalations. No frantic Teams or Slack threads at 2 a.m. Everything humming along exactly as it should. And somewhere in a leadership meeting, someone looks at the metrics dashboard, sees a flat line of incidents and says: "Seems like things are pretty calm over there. Do we really need all those people?" ... I've spent many years in engineering, and this pattern keeps repeating ...